In international relations, quiet realignments often speak louder than grand summits. But the 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro was both: a carefully choreographed spectacle and a geopolitical tremor. While many in the West viewed it through the dusty lens of Cold War binaries, the rest of the world saw something different — the confident emergence of the Global South as co-authors, not footnotes, of the 21st-century world order.
For Southeast Asia, long tugged between competing powers, the symbolism hit home. Indonesia’s full inclusion into the BRICS bloc marks not just a diplomatic milestone, but a shift in self-perception. We are no longer merely the object of global strategies — we are now co-strategists.
Bandung Redux: The Legacy of Non-Alignment Returns
When leaders from 10 BRICS+ nations posed for a photo in Rio, the image was uncannily reminiscent of Bandung 1955 — a moment when postcolonial states first gathered to reject imposed ideologies and demand space for their own aspirations. Back then, it was about refusing to choose between Soviet and Western blocs. Today, it's about transcending the false dichotomy between dependence and isolation.
Indonesia’s founding fathers — Sukarno and Hatta — would have recognized this moment. Not because it mirrors the past, but because it fulfills an old promise: that we could someday act in unison, not merely in protest, but in policy.
A World in Transition: Multipolarity as Reality, Not Rhetoric
For decades, international institutions — from the UN Security Council to the Bretton Woods twins — have maintained the illusion of global consensus while enshrining structural imbalance. According to a 2024 IMF report, countries representing more than 60% of the world’s population control less than 20% of voting power at the institution. BRICS is not the panacea for this imbalance, but it is one of the first credible attempts to counterweight it.
The 2025 BRICS declaration didn’t just outline common values — it made demands: the reform of the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement mechanism, a stronger voice for emerging economies in the UN system, and a call for the Global South to define development on its own terms, not based on OECD yardsticks.
Southeast Asia’s New Agency: Between Temasek and Ternate
Southeast Asia’s response to this shift is more pragmatic than ideological. We are not turning our backs on the West. Our economies remain deeply intertwined with the U.S., EU, Japan, and Australia. But the region is increasingly refusing to be caught in zero-sum traps. Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand — all named as potential BRICS partners — are signaling their readiness to diversify without being subsumed.
This is, in part, cultural. Southeast Asia has always thrived at the crossroads. From the spice trade of Ternate and Tidore to the port of Melaka, we have long known how to play empires off each other — not out of desperation, but out of strategic dexterity.
Palestine, Ukraine, and the Politics of Principle
The BRICS bloc’s explicit support for Palestinian statehood, delivered in direct language rarely heard in multilateral declarations, stands in stark contrast to the West’s rhetorical acrobatics. The 2025 summit didn’t merely express “concern” over Gaza; it demanded an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and full humanitarian access. This is not just policy — it’s a litmus test for international moral consistency.
When juxtaposed with the rapid Western response to Ukraine, the hypocrisy becomes glaring. While the West supplied weapons and sanctions in defense of Kyiv, its reactions to Gaza have often been ambiguous or absent. BRICS’s stance exposes what many in the Global South have long felt but rarely said aloud: that global values must not be geographically selective.
This growing consensus is not about being anti-Western. It is about being anti-double-standard.
A New Economic Blueprint: Beyond Dollar Diplomacy
At the heart of BRICS lies a financial ambition: to challenge the monopoly of the U.S. dollar and the conditionality of Western-led financial institutions. With tools like the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, BRICS is offering a parallel track — one that is slowly gaining traction in regions long frustrated by IMF austerity recipes and World Bank project delays.
Indonesia’s Finance Minister noted earlier this year that over 40% of Southeast Asia’s development financing still comes with political strings. If BRICS financing can offer an alternative — even partial — it will alter negotiating power dramatically.
The Long Game: Can BRICS Withstand Its Own Contradictions?
Of course, the bloc is no utopia. Tensions between India and China, ideological rifts between members, and unresolved maritime disputes (like the South China Sea) could test its coherence. But here’s the key: BRICS doesn’t require perfect unity — only shared intent. In that sense, it mirrors ASEAN itself: diverse, complex, yet surprisingly resilient.
Whether BRICS can institutionalize its ambitions remains an open question. The 2026 summit in India will be telling. But one thing is already clear: the days of unquestioned Western primacy in the Global South are over.
The Southeast Asian Stakes
For Southeast Asia, BRICS is not a rejection — it’s an assertion. An assertion that we can engage with Beijing without alienating Washington. That we can join BRICS without abandoning ASEAN. That we can support Palestine without ignoring Ukraine. And that we can shape the future without erasing the past.
Our future will not be made in Brussels or Beijing alone — it will be shaped in Jakarta, in Manila, in Hanoi, and in the voices of those who have long been heard only in translation.
The age of the in-between is over. We’re not between powers. We are one.
